Maybe Lummox is Dan, he just though it'd be fun to develop stuff with BYOND instead of developing BYOND for a while, and pretend to be a regular user. But he got tired of it and now he's developing BYOND again.

I've met Dan personally, and seen pictures of Lummox, so I can say for sure that they aren't the same. However, everybody knows that Nadrew "wer daN".

Becoming a good programmer doesn't happen over night and takes a lot of effort and practice. I think the biggest problem here is people are comparing themselves with other people who are still in the process of learning the basics and end up thinking they are really better than they are and start perpetuating nonsense.

Hence the original thread, where I said repeatedly: If someone thinks they're intermediate to advanced, they're probably wrong. I wish we had a healthy population of intermediate programmers, but so many get stuck in the common pitfalls of DM and yet think they're still advancing, that we end up with a bigger population of outright newbies instead. Then they go writing really bad demos, or worse bad libraries, which just confuses people further!

Learning the language is a very small step in becoming a good programmer though it helps to know the quirks of a language before you can program in it well. But before you can really notice or understand these quirks you have to understand enough about programming.

Indeed. 80-90% of programming is just grokking the process of it and being able to spell out what you want in the simplest terms. Knowing how to put that into an individual language accounts for the rest.

Proper optimization goes well beyond using less variables and in some cases that'll just end up being detrimental. A properly built bubble sort is never going to be faster than a decent quick sort on a large number of items regardless on how many tricks and optimizations you do on the bubble sort simply because of how many less iterations you'll preform with the quick sort. Knowing a wide variety of data structures and algorithms along with their advantages and disadvantages is much more critical to efficient code. Even something as simple as knowing what a stack or a linked list are and what advantages and pitfalls they have is probably well beyond the scope of what some of the people who think they know what they are doing here despite being trivial, common, and the basis for much more complex data structures.

Indeed, I'd say data structures and algorithms are the foundation any intermediate programmer builds on. Not even a large number of them need to be known, as long as the programmer grasps how and when to use the basic ones.

I missed the part where he said you have to go to college to be experienced. 0.o

Technically he just said that's one form of experience that more advanced programmers have had. Though frankly I learned next to nothing in my programming classes in college, except in two cases. One of my courses was a Java course, which I took as an alternative to actually having to wade through online references on my dialup connection; the only sucky part was that it was a night course. Another course was all on data structures, and that was quite interesting.

Though frankly I learned next to nothing in my programming classes in college, except in two cases.

Haha I should dig up some of my old code before I took some college courses. Most my initial programming experience was in an archaic version of BASIC that required line numbers. I learned by entering in a figuring out the source code from the computers BASIC reference manual, tweaking it, and figuring out what various stuff did. One of my early text adventure games involved this lovely structure

label
print room description
get input
if input = "go north" goto northroomlabel
if input = "go south" goto southroomlabel
... (continues with all the rest of the availible in game commands)

then I copy and pasted the whole block dozens and dozens of times for all the rooms. Being self taught I had no sense for programming conventions or any idea how to maintain tidy code. Which should make even the worst source code here look half decent.

While still impressive for a pre-teen, after just one programming course the quality of my source code improved by giant leaps and bounds. Even if you don't learn a lot in college, a few classes is great just so you get an idea of what not to do(or get some basic clue as to why it's stupid) so you get a good fountain by which to learn on top of so you can at least spot stupid stuff and not pick up bad habits from it. This doesn't have to come from school I guess but I'm a bit biases since that's where I picked it up from.

Another course was all on data structures, and that was quite interesting.

Yeah hands down my data structures and algorithms class was my favorite class and opened my eyes to a world of awesomeness. Something just elegant about simple clever ideas that radically improve performance. My algorithm analysis course could have been cool too if I didn't end up with such a dry boring monotonous professor.

Though frankly I learned next to nothing in my programming classes in college, except in two cases.

Haha I should dig up some of my old code before I took some college courses. Most my initial programming experience was in an archaic version of BASIC that required line numbers.

My first language was Atari BASIC, but by the time I was in college I had moved on to C and C++ on the PC, and had developed PlunderMine and begun The Belts. I can't say my C++ was very good at the time, but I understood a lot of the concepts like data structures, etc., though I daresay I understand them a lot better now.

I learned by entering in a figuring out the source code from the computers BASIC reference manual, tweaking it, and figuring out what various stuff did. One of my early text adventure games involved this lovely structure

label
print room description
get input
if input = "go north" goto northroomlabel
if input = "go south" goto southroomlabel
... (continues with all the rest of the availible in game commands)

then I copy and pasted the whole block dozens and dozens of times for all the rooms. Being self taught I had no sense for programming conventions or any idea how to maintain tidy code. Which should make even the worst source code here look half decent.

I hear you there. My early code tended to be pretty disorganized too.

Of course then there's the BYOND source....

Another course was all on data structures, and that was quite interesting.

Yeah hands down my data structures and algorithms class was my favorite class and opened my eyes to a world of awesomeness. Something just elegant about simple clever ideas that radically improve performance. My algorithm analysis course could have been cool too if I didn't end up with such a dry boring monotonous professor.

Algorithms are awesome. They are far and away the best part of programming because you get to learn elegant ways to solve lots of problems. One of my most-read books is Practical Algorithms in C++ by Bryan Flamig; it covers algorithms and some data structures as well. It's already proven useful to me many times over, from SotS II's heap sort (used for A* pathing) to the Boyer-Moore-Horspool search I implemented in Blankless.

Your post is about 20 posts under Theodis, away from anyone mentioning him. You never mentioned him in your post, and neither did the kid you were replying too.

It is not obvious, and I hope one day you can see that.

kthx

*EDIT: You still haven't answered my question: What games has Theodis created commercially?

Actually, he was replying to ShadowUser's post, who was replying to Theodis' post. If you're ever wondering who someone is replying to, try clicking the "Parent ID" link. It'll take you to the post that they clicked the actual Reply button on. (Which if they know how the forums work, will be the actual post they meant to reply to.)

I did Data Structures and Algorithms just this semester - it wasn't massively interesting for me. I very much preferred Computer Systems, in which we were writing assembly code for a simplified processor called 'DLX'. It's a nice little RISC thing.

I did not, however, learn a thing in Computer Science IA or Computer Science IB. Still decently fun, though.